Warlords of Europe

First, a big thanks to Imperious Leader for the invitation to come over here and plug our games.

Next, let me briefly introduce myself and Conquest Gaming. I’m Russ, and my business partners Kyle and Ken used to be my gaming buddies back in the late 1990’s. Kyle and another mutual friend introduced me to Axis&Allies in college. I didn’t like it much because I played USSR and my US/UK overlords advised me to buy nothing but tanks! A couple of years later, I saw some other guys playing in the dorm, and joined in and loved it. A couple more years later, I found Kyle (again) and Ken through a different mutual friend. From there, we invented Warlords of Europe. But, not having a ton of money for production, we turned to expansion type games using the pieces from A&A and RISK to help generate some money. Warlords was always in the back of our mind, and we never would make it an expansion. It had to be done right, if at all.

It’s done right. And right now. The very first games shipped out Feb 11. I invite you to take a look at our website, and at BGG. We’ve got pictures and detailed descriptions of the game in those locations. You can e-mail me directly if you have any questions. I’ll also stop by here from time to time to see what’s going on when I get a chance. See, we’re still just 3 gaming buddies with day jobs, and now separated by a couple of states. We have no cubicle dwellers keeping track of the books or shipping stuff out, so its pretty busy.

And finally, here’s some exclusive AA.org content, never before seen on the web anywhere (I may have posted some of that other stuff elsewhere previously, I really don’t recall): 
One day in the late 1990’s, Ken and Kyle sketched a huge map of Europe on 2 poster boards taped together, wrote down maybe 2 dozen special event cards (many were duplicates), and played what was a modified Shogun (Samurai Swords) on their Europe map (using the Shogun pieces, the RISK cavalry, and A&A money). They showed it to me the next gaming session, and after playing it, I went home and went to bed. I lay there wide awake, thinking. I finally just got up and cranked up MSPublisher v2.0 and started writing rules and a ton of new event cards, for several hours. We tried my ideas during the next gaming session, much of it “stuck” and remains to this day, as do many of their original cards and their terrain based combat/economic system. After a few weeks, they invited me to form a company with them for the eventual publication of Warlords.

The game has changed quite a lot from those first few weeks, and our company has created a ton of other games (but only a few have we published thus far). Nevertheless, Warlords created Conquest and not the other way around. It was first, and best, and we saved it for over a decade. It’s been an intense 2 years that we’ve been finalizing and printing it. Needless to say, we’re quite proud of the result.

If you’ve ever gotten an e-mail from Conquest, chances are good that you’ve seen this line before…
“We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we do.”

@FieldMarshalGames:

Any hope of a new or revised release of your other AAA related expansions?

Hope? Yes, some but not much and not soon. Hopefully we’ll reprint Warlords first, in larger numbers (current run is 2000). Then, we’ve got some new titles we’d like to see happen. But Operation Barbarossa and A House Divided The Brothers War are both pretty good candidates to re-imagine into full plastic piece games somewhere in the unknown future, all predicated on the success of Warlords.

Thanks all for the welcome and encouragement. I too am looking forward to seeing pics of those painted Warlords pieces.

Conquest of the Pacific is probably down lower on the list because it’s just 2 players.

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I had a tough time finding a good “all encompassing” place name for the Northumbria fief (because there isn’t one that I could find). But, we needed that fief to reach as far southward as it does so that it could be “adjacent” to the Champagne fief. I tweaked the shape of pretty much every historical area to fit the map that we had been test playing for a decade*, which was originally a total abstraction not based in any real historical period. But it was fun for gameplay, which always trumped historical accuracy. Warlords is not a simulation, but an abstraction that does somewhat fit into the fractured 1200AD political landscape (for instance, there were obviously a lot more than 12 castles in Europe…the number that comes with the game). We hope the gamers will agree that it plays well, and we hope the historians can suspend their disbelief for a few hours to enjoy a game.

When you do tweak the map yourselves, I suggest you try to keep the same fiefs adjacent to each other as in the original. A lot of care went into making sure the most common starting castle fiefs for the 4 corner kingdoms are spaced fairly, up/down/left/right/diagonally. Though the map is a visual rectangle, the movement spaces make more of a logical square. This way top/bottom players would not be encouraged to fight each other more than left/right players simply due to map imbalance.

*When I say fit, I really mean match the adjacencies of the old paper/pencil posterboard, and not the actual shapes.